The NHL tried something new with how this year's draft worked. It got awkward

For decades, the NHL had a unique approach to their annual draft. While other leagues used a decentralized approach, with teams drafting from various war rooms around North America, the NHL brought everyone to one host city for a days-long celebration of the future. Aside from 2020 and 2021, when COVID forced a fully virtual draft, it’s been an everyone-invited event for decades. It was a rare case of hockey doing something cool and unique.

And so of course, this year, they said: Nah, let’s just do it the way everyone else does.

Back in 2023, we reported on the reasons behind the potential change, but we’ll summarize here: It was expensive for teams to fly their entire front office and scouting staffs in to the draft,  the travel was a pain, the draft floor was too crowded for making trades, and there wasn’t enough time to get everyone back home before free agency opened.

You could argue that all of those complains are reasonable. You could also point out that absolutely none of them have anything to do with the fans, or the viewers at home. The NHL is ostensibly an entertainment product, but they tend to forget that minor detail roughly (checks notes) all the time. Is saving a few bucks worth it if one of your biggest nights looks worse as a result?

Maybe not, but that’s only if it looks worse. Maybe it could be fine. Heck, maybe it would even be an improvement – it’s not like the old way got rave reviews each and every year. Then again, last year’s Sphere experience would be a tough act to follow.

I didn’t love the change when it was first announced, but I was intrigued, especially after reading Julian’s piece about how it would all work. I wanted to give it a fair shot. Here are my thoughts on the good, the bad, and everything in between from Friday’s night’s opening round.

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Which team can build the most impressive starting lineup of cap era draft busts?

It’s draft weekend in the NHL. A time for renewal, and replenishment, and metaphors about fresh sheets of ice. Optimism, you might even say. This may be the one day of the year where every team and their fan base can legitimately feel like their situation is about to get better.

We can’t have that. Let’s make everyone sad instead.

Today’s post is simple: We’re going to go around the league and try to assemble the best six-man lineup of draft busts from the cap era. That’s three forwards, two defensemen and a goalie that were good enough to be worth a high pick, but for whatever reason just didn’t work out at the NHL level. We’re limiting this to first-round picks for the skaters, and to the first three rounds for goalies (who rarely get picked in the first).

Sound fun? No? Good, that’s the whole point. Let’s remember some whiffs.

As usual, we’ll do about 10 teams and then turn it over to you in the comments to suggest other contenders. Let’s start with the Bruins, if only because all their fans know what’s coming and we might as well rip the bandaid off right away.

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How rare is it for first overall picks like Taylor Hall to play for this many teams?

Friday night’s Mikko Rantanen blockbuster was such a monster trade that the inclusion of a former Hart Trophy winner felt like a footnote. But there was Taylor Hall, heading to Carolina and his seventh stop in the NHL.

That led to what I thought was an interesting question from a reader:

What's the record for most teams played for by a first-overall pick? Hall's gotta be getting close if he doesn't already have it, that's seven teams now

— Jay (@JRTW1206) January 25, 2025

That could be a fun topic for a post. Spoiler alert: The record isn’t held by Hall… yet. And you might be surprised how many first overall picks ended up building resumes worthy of a journeyman.

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Who was the worst pick of the cap era, based on the players drafted right after?

It’s time for this year’s draft week time-waster, the annual tradition in which we spend a day arguing about one of the most intriguing events on the NHL calendar. This year, let’s take a new angle on an old question: What was the worst draft pick of the cap era?

It’s a question that comes up often enough that you can probably recite the usual suspects. Nail Yakupov in 2012. Nikita Filatov in 2008. Gilbert Brule in 2005. That bum that your favorite team took instead of the stay-at-home defenseman your uncle wanted.

But are some of those names fair? Yakupov was a bust, sure, but the 2012 draft was a mess. If the Oilers had somehow had a premonition from the future and shocked us all by passing on Yakupov, who would they have taken instead? The next player picked was Ryan Murray. The next forward was Alex Galchenyuk. The fourth overall pick was Griffin Reinhart, and the Oilers are probably glad they never acquired… OK, bad example maybe, but you get the idea. In 2008, Filatov was picked ahead of Colin Wilson, Mikkel Bødker, Josh Bailey and Cody Hodgson, who all had better careers by far but weren’t exactly franchise players. Brule went just ahead of Jack Skille, Devin Setoguchi and Brian Lee.

There were better plays available later in those drafts, of course, but it hardly seems fair to say a team whiffed on a top-ten pick because they should have taken a guy who ended up going 173rd. Clearly, that player was never a realistic option. It’s easy hindsight, but it’s not real criticism.

Today, let’s look at the problem a different way, by rephrasing the question: Who was the worst pick of the cap era, judged by how good the players taken right after him turned out to be? It’s one thing to pick a bust who’s only slightly worse than the picks who followed. It’s another entirely to watch a cast of all-stars immediately go off the board.

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Which year gave us the best draft class at each position?

Today’s draft week time-waster is a simple one: Which entry draft produced the best class at each of the five positions?

That’s a nice easy one to work with, right? I’m not even sure we need the traditional ground rules, other than to note that we’re doing the entry draft era (meaning back to 1979), and that we’re not counting left and right-shooting defenseman as different positions because we’re not lunatics.

There is one question to figure out before we can start, though: What exactly does it mean to be the “best” draft class for a position? How many guys do we need before we make a call?

On the one hand, I don’t think we want to go too deep, because then we’re debating the 14th best left wingers taken in competing years, and neither is a guy you’ve ever heard of. But I also don’t think we want to go too top heavy – after all, you could make the case that whichever year produced Mario Lemieux or Nicklas Lidstrom is the best one no matter who else was involved, but then we’re just listing the greatest players of the era and nobody’s learning anything.

In the end, I made the call that I want enough players to fill out a full roster, plus a spare. That means three goalies, seven defensemen and five each at center, left wing and right wing. That feels like it’s workable without being too daunting. After all, it can’t be that hard to find a bunch of drafts that have that many stars at a given position, right? Huh, interesting, the “ironic foreshadowing” symbol on my dashboard just lit up, I’m sure it’s nothing.

Let’s build from the net out and see where this takes us.

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Ranking the ten best first overall picks who weren't the best player in their own draft

One of the fun things about tonight’s draft is that there’s still some genuine intrigue over who’ll go first overall. We’ve spent most of the last year assuming it was the Shane Wright draft, but with Juraj Slafkovsky making a late push and at least a little longshot love for Logan Cooley, we’re really not sure what Montreal will do in front of the home crowd. That’s rare, and kind of cool.

First overall picks are tricky. Often, they turn out to be exactly what you’d expect them to be – the best player in the draft, one that a team can build around for a generation. Other times, they end up being a bust, the sort of mistake that can set a franchise back years. But there’s another category, and it’s one I’m always kind of intrigued by. I call them an Olajuwon.

Hakeem Olajuwon was the first overall pick of the 1984 NBA draft, and is considered one of the greatest players in league history. He was a dominating center who won an MVP and two championships, was a 12-time all-star, and was an easy Hall of Fame call in his first year of eligibility. But despite all that, he’s not the best player from his own draft year, because the third pick that year was a kid named Michael Jordan. Olajuwon did everything you could ever ask a number one pick to do… except be the best player in his draft.

I appreciate a good Olajuwon story, where a first overall pick lives up to the hype but still gets passed by a later pick. Hockey has a few of its own, and today we’re going to rank them. To be clear, we’re not looking for busts here, so Patrik Stefan, Nail Yakupov and friends are safe. We want guys who were great, but just not quite as great as someone picked after them. And we’re looking for cases like Olajuwon and Jordan, where virtually everyone would agree, so you can save your Taylor vs. Tyler debates for another day.

Will Wright or Slafkovsky join this list someday? Time will tell, but for now here are the ten best players in NHL history who went first overall and delivered on their potential, but still weren’t the best player in their draft year.

10. Chris Phillips (1996)

Why he was great: The 1996 draft was notoriously weak, with the leading scorer of the class being Matt Cullen with just 731 points. But with several busts in the first round, Phillips turned out to be a perfectly solid pick. He played 17 seasons, all with Ottawa, and almost all of them as a trustworthy top-four option. He had Norris votes in multiple seasons, scored a huge playoff overtime goal, and had his number retired by his team. You could do far worse with the first pick, especially in a year like this.

But not quite as great as: Zdeno Chara, who went to the Islanders in the third round. Of course, Chara ended up in Ottawa, and even played with Phillips for much of his stint there, so it all worked out for the Sens. But yeah, Phillips was a very good player and Chara is a first-ballot HHOF lock, and nobody’s debating which one was better.

See how this works? Let’s make our way down the list…

9. Rick Nash (2002)

Why he was great: Nash was the Blue Jackets’ first real star, and to this day is probably the greatest player in franchise history. He won a Rocket Richard in just his second season, and went on to score 437 goals in a 15-year career. He probably would have hit 500 if injuries hadn’t cut his career short.

But not quite as great as: Duncan Keith, who went in the second round, and is still active 20 years later. Keith has two Norris Trophies and a Conn Smythe to go with three Cup rings. Nash was great, but nobody’s taking him over Keith with full benefit of hindsight.

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Which draft year makes the best starting lineup of players taken from different rounds?

A year ago we tried to figure out which team could build the best six-man roster out of players they’d drafted, without using anyone they’d picked in the same round. It was a fun little exercise, even if the winning team was the one everyone probably figured it would be.

Reader Jacob B. had a similar question, but with a twist: Instead of finding the best team, let’s find the best draft year. It’s still a limit of one player per round, but we’re basing this on the full league’s work in a given year instead of a specific team’s entire history. Nice and simple, let’s do this.

But first, a few ground rules:

• We’re sticking to positions for this one, meaning our forwards need to be a center, a left winger and a right winger. In cases where somebody moved around, we’ll emphasize the position a guy played most of his career at. We don’t get care about handedness on defensemen, though.
• We’re going back to the start of the entry draft era in 1979. Sorry, amateur draft completionists.
• I’m not actually sure we need any other ground rules, but this section always has at least three bullet points so here we are. How are you doing? Good? That’s good. Me too, thanks for asking.

OK, let’s get started. And as is often the case, it probably makes sense to begin at the beginning. In our case, that means 1979.

Team 1979

The 1979 draft is often mentioned as the best ever, and rightly so. With a double cohort (due to lowering the draft age from 19 to 18), this class includes stars like one of the greatest defensemen of all time in Ray Bourque, a 700-goal guy in Mike Gartner, plus two more Hall-of-Famers in Michel Goulet and Kevin Lowe.

But here’s where we run into a problem that will plague us throughout this challenge – all four of those guys were first-round picks, so we can only take one. It’s a reasonably easy call to go with Bourque, but right off the bat we’re leaving about 1,250 goals on the table. Look, we never said this would be easy.

The Oilers give us some strong options up front with Mark Messier in the third and Glenn Anderson in the fourth. While I’m tempted to sneak in Messier as a left winger, where he played his first few years in the league, his best years came as a center so we’ll play him there, costing us guys like Dale Hunter, Guy Carbonneau and Thomas Steen.

We still need a goalie, a defenseman and a left winger, and here’s where we realize the big problem with 1979: That year’s draft was only six rounds long, so we have zero wiggle room. Another problem that we’ll probably run into a few times is that we’re low on options for left wing, especially if we don’t count Mike Krushelnyski, who played more center. This leads to a dilemma where we either go with a decent goalie in round two and take a no-name left winger, or we use our second round slot on Brent Ashton and have to settle for Marco Baron in net.

I don’t like either option, and eventually settle on an answer I wasn’t expecting – we have to cut Glenn Anderson. That lets us use our fourth-round pick on 400-goal man John Ogrodnick on the other side, then fill out our roster with Dirk Graham, Pelle Lindbergh and Doug Crossman.

Forwards: C Mark Messier (3), LW John Ogrodnick (4), RW Dirk Graham (5)

Defense: Ray Bourque (1), Doug Crossman (6)

Goalie: Pelle Lindberg (2)

That’s a good team, but not a great one, and if it’s the best we can do with one of the best draft classes ever then we may be in trouble. The good news is the draft expands by several rounds starting in 1980, so we have more to work with from now on.

The next few years offer up some solid drafts that are too top heavy for our purposes. But soon we get to one that has a late-round pick we can build around…

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Which team can build the best six-man lineup of players drafted in different rounds?

Today’s post is based on an idea that several of you have sent in, in some form or other. The most recent, and the one who inspired me to go ahead and do this, was from long-time reader Bill B., who I think is more of a football guy but apparently dabbles in hockey. Thanks Bill.

We’re going to take a run at a straightforward question: Which NHL team can make the best six-man starting lineup from players they’ve drafted, without using anyone who was picked in the same round?

That’s it. Nice and simple. We’re going to look for three forwards, two defensemen and a goalie that were all drafted by the same team, and all in different rounds. You get credit for everything that player did in their career (not just what they did for your team). Active players are eligible, but only based on what they’ve already done, not what they might do down the line. And no undrafted players – sorry, Wayne, you’re sitting this one out.

It should be easy enough to build out some teams. Will they be any good? That’s where it will get tricky, but of course your already knew that. As always, I’ll try to cover about half the league and then turn it over to you in the comments to fill in any teams you think can beat mine.

We’ll start where we usually do for these sort of things, by tapping into the rich history of the Original Six. They don’t have as much of an advantage as they usually do, since the NHL draft only started in 1963, and was pretty barren until well into the 70s, but the Original Six teams are the only ones with access to every draft ever held. They should be pretty good. Let’s see if they are.

Montreal Canadiens

The Habs are a great team to start with, because they illustrate the highs and lows of how this will play out. They start us off with easy picks, including Guy Lafleur as our first-round pick – he’s not only the all-time leading scorer among Habs draft picks, but he’s over 500 points ahead of the next most productive first-rounder (Saku Koivu). We have another easy call in the third round, with Patrick Roy filling our goalie slot.

The second round is a tougher choice, but in a good way, as we have to pick between Larry Robinson or Chris Chelios as our top defenseman. You can’t really go wrong with either, so three rounds in and we’ve got a slam-dunk Hall-of-Famer at each position.

And then… uh oh.

With apologies to Brent Gilchrist and Gilbert Dionne, the Canadiens have never really had a great fourth-round pick. The fifth round offers up Brendan Gallagher and Mikhail Grabovski but not much else. The sixth is actually much more fertile ground, with two 1,000-game forwards in Keith Acton and Craig Conroy, plus a strong blueline option in Andrei Markov. And then we go bargain hunting in the late rounds, looking through names like Tom Kurvers and Lyle Odelein (seventh), Michael Ryder and Brian Savage (eighth), and maybe Mark Streit (ninth). There’s also Viacheslav Fetisov in the 12th back in 1978, but he never showed interest in coming to Montreal and was re-drafted by the Devils five years later, so he doesn’t seem to fit the spirit of the thing.

In the end, I think you fill out your top six with Markov, Gallagher, and then I guess Ryder. It’s not a bad lineup, by any stretch, but it’s nowhere near as good as what we seemed to be headed for after those first three choices. This isn’t going to be easy.

Forwards: Guy Lafleur (1), Brendan Gallagher (5), Michael Ryder (8)

Defensemen: Larry Robinson (2), Andrei Markov (6)

Goalie: Patrick Roy (3)

Let’s see if one of Montreal’s oldest rivals can beat that group…

Boston Bruins

Like Montreal, the Bruins get off to any easy start. The first-rounder here is relatively obvious, as we briefly consider Joe Thornton before going ahead and penciling in Ray Bourque. And while it may be a somewhat surprising name, we also have an easy choice in goal with third-rounder Ken Dryden, a Bruin’s pick who was traded to Montreal before he debuted. That costs us fellow third-round pick Brad Marchand, but unless we want Dan Bouchard or Andrew Raycroft in net, we don’t really have a choice.

From there, I think we have to go with Patrice Bergeron in round two, and then the hunt for value starts. We can find some in eighth-round pick Don Sweeney (edging out Hal Gill), and ninth-round pick Craig MacTavish. That leaves us with one more forward slot to fill, and we can have our choice of fourth-round picks like Joey Juneau or Steve Kasper, fifth-rounders Ted Donato and Mariusz Czerkawski, or sixth-rounder Mike Krushelnyski. Those guys are all pretty similar, and the end result is a decent team that’s probably a little more balanced that Montreal’s even if it’s not necessarily better.

Forwards: Patrice Bergeron (2), Craig MacTavish (9), Mariusz Czerkawski (5)

Defensemen: Ray Bourque (1), Don Sweeney (8)

Goalie: Ken Dryden (3)

One more Original Six entry…

Toronto Maple Leafs

Woof.

Yeah, here’s the thing about the Leafs draft history – they’re actually pretty good in round one. They’ve drafted two Hall-of-Famers in Darryl Sittler and Lanny MacDonald, a 1,200-point player in Vincent Damphousse, plus Tuukka Rask, Wendel Clark, and the current trio of first-round stars. For a team with a reputation for whiffing on draft picks, we’ve got plenty of options there.

But then… yikes. Apparently Maple Leaf scouts go home after round one, because there just isn’t much in the way of value anywhere. The all-time leading scorer among players drafted by the Maple Leafs after round one is second-rounder Rick Kehoe, with 767 points; that’s not great, but the next two forwards on the list are Yanic Perreault and Tiger Williams.

We can find a couple of late-round values on the blueline in Tomas Kaberle and Anton Stralman, which is enough to bump Randy Carlyle from the round two slot. There’s also personal favorite Sergei Berezin, a tenth-round pick. But yeah, overall the Leafs entry just isn’t all that good.

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The Athletic Hockey Show: Free agent frenzy

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- The Fleury trade, and what happens next
- What Dougie Hamilton will get
- Ovechkin's extension
- DeAngelo to Carolina?
- Who might sign the deal a team instantly regrets
- Should we abolish the draft?
- The greatest one-for-one trades in NHL history, and more...

The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)

Let’s painstakingly build the worst possible team-by-team first round in NHL draft history

Last year, in the aftermath of the 2020 draft, I took on a challenge from a reader. They wanted me to come up with the ultimate first round, one where I’d use one pick from each team to create the best possible list of 31 choices. I threw in a bunch of rules to make it overly complicated and got to work, and this was the final result.

People seemed to like it. We debated the picks in the comments, readers argued about which teams got shafted, and a few of you even tried to make your own version.

And then, as always, came the request: OK, now do the same thing but for the worst picks.

Yeah, I knew this was coming. So now, as we count down to the first round of the 2021 draft, that’s what we’re going to do. One full round of draft whiffs, one per team.

But first, a quick caveat. Sports fans love to talk about busts and wasted picks and sure-things who never made it. It’s part of being a fan. But before we dive into a full post of “bad” picks, let’s acknowledge that each of these guys was a dominant player as kid, sacrificed a ton growing up to chase a dream, and earned the right to be one of the first players to hear their name called in their draft year. The NHL is a hard league to succeed in, and circumstances will sometimes line up against you. That’s sports. But none of these guys were failures.

With that out of the way, here are the ground rules.

– We’re going to make 30 picks, and each player has to go in the exact draft slot they were picked in. We get to use one and only one pick per team. We’ll cover the entry draft era, meaning we’re going back to 1979.

– Yes, I said 30 picks and not 31. As much as it annoys the completionist in me, I’m excluding Vegas here, for a simple reason: They haven’t been around long enough to have a truly bad pick. They had three in 2017, and all three are on track to be good-to-great NHL players. And they’ve only had two other first-round picks in franchise history, both in the last two years, which is far too little time to cast judgment. I don’t want to include someone just for the sake of it, so Vegas is out.

– We’re looking for picks from current teams only, meaning no picks from the Nordiques, Whalers, Scouts or whoever else. But the Jets are the Jets, so Winnipeg can use either version of the team.

– As with last time, we’ll have a position limit to hit. You told me I had too many forwards last year, so we’ll adjust that a bit and aim to pick at least 15 forwards, at least 10 defensemen, and at least four goalies.

– Finally, two more rules just to make this even more complicated. First, everyone we pick has to have at least made the NHL, because it’s only fun to remember some guys when there’s at least a small chance you’ll actually remember them. And second, each of our picks has to have actually been a first-rounder – we can’t use a 25th overall pick from the 1980s, because back then that was round two. This is really going to limit us the deeper we go, and I will probably hate myself for it.

Got it? Good, because we’ve got 30 picks, access to all of the entry draft era, and endless possibilities to build for the future. Let’s screw this up as badly as possibly with the worst first round we could have.

We’ll begin at the beginning, with the first overall pick, and it’s a tougher slot that you might think. There are plenty of players who are considered busts at number one, but most of them had better careers than you probably remember. Alexander Daigle wasn’t Chris Pronger, but he stuck around for about a decade and had over 100 goals. So did Doug Wickenheiser and Brian Lawton, even though they weren’t Denis Savard or Steve Yzerman.

The obvious choice is probably Patrik Stefan, but we can’t use him because he was a Thrashers pick and they’re not around anymore. That narrows us down to two real options: Gord Kluzak, a hard-nosed defenseman who went to Boston ahead of Scott Stevens and Phil Housley in 1982, or 2012 first pick Nail Yakupov. I’m a little hesitant to use an Oiler right off the bat, because man, that franchise has a ton of first-round misses we might need down the line. But I think a goal-scoring winger who only manages 62 before washing out of the league at 24 years old probably has to be our guy.

Pick #1: F Nail Yakupov, Edmonton Oilers, 2012

We don’t have a ton of candidates for our second pick, as it’s way too early to give up on guys like Nolan Patrick and Kaapo Kakko, and Pat Falloon was better than you think. San Jose’s Andrei Zyuzin gets a good look here, although the 1996 draft was so awful that I’m not actually convinced he was a bad pick. Luckily, there’s one name that stands out: Islanders’ winger Dave Chyzowski, who went second overall in 1989 but only managed 15 goals in a six-season NHL career.

Pick #2: F Dave Chyzowski, New York Islanders, 1989

The field starts to open up just a bit as we head to our next few picks. Neil Brady and Cam Barker get some serious consideration in the three-spot, Pavel Brendl and Wayne McBean make a case at number four, and Shawn Anderson and (maybe) Olli Juolevi are worth a look as a fifth pick. We do lose a strong candidate to our “no defunct teams” rule, as Quebec’s Daniel Dore can’t be our choice, which is a shame given the weird story of how they got that pick.

This is a little concerning: We’re already running into some players who are ruled out by our one-player-per-team rule, as the Yakupov pick means we can’t use Edmonton’s Jason Bonsignore (#4 in 1994) and Chyzowski costs us Michael Dal Colle (#5 in 2014). And if that isn’t enough of a bummer for Oiler and Islander fans, let’s hit them with a double-whammy by mentioning Griffin Reinhart (#4 in 2012).

But even without New York or Edmonton, we can still find some strong candidates for our next three picks. We’ll even have a theme, albeit an accidental one, as we focus on Russian forwards.

Pick #3: F Alexander Svitov, Tampa Bay Lightning, 2001

Pick #4: F Alexander Volchkov, Washington Capitals, 1994

Pick #5: F Stanislav Chistov, Anaheim Ducks, 2001

Yikes, that 2001 draft was a mess. In case you’re wondering, Chistov’s 19 career goals leads this group, ahead of Svitov’s 13 and, uh, nothing at all from Volchkov, who played just three NHL games.

We’re five picks in and we’ve gone with forwards each time. (That’s what the “F” next to each guy means, by the way, although you’d be forgiven for assuming they were Pronman’s draft grades.) That many forwards is far from a disaster, since we’ve got 25 picks to catch up on our position requirements, but we should probably start building out the back end. We’ll start with our first goalie.

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In which a simple question about NHL draft history goes wrong

So I had what I thought was a neat idea for a draft-related column. Instead, I think I discovered a new and immutable law of the NHL universe. Stay with me, it’s the offseason and this is going to get weird.

Here was the original idea: What’s the best starting six you could make if you just took the first players drafted at each position in a given draft year? In other words, you take the first center, the first left winger, the first right winger, the first two defenseman and the first goalie selected in an NHL entry draft, and that’s your six. Which year gives you the best mix of legitimate stars?

Simple enough, right? It’s even easy enough to research, since plenty of sites list every pick from every draft. We do get into a bit of a grey area when it comes to positions, since some guys move around the ice a bit and it can be tough to figure out what exactly a team thought they were drafting, but that’s not a huge hurdle. I decided to use hockey-reference.com as my guide, and that I’d just default to which ever position they listed unless I could find convincing evidence that they were wrong.

I also decided to start with the first entry draft, which was the legendary class of 1979. That skips the 17 years of amateur drafts from 1963 to 1978, but that seems fine since those 1960s drafts tended to be terrible and the 1970s weren’t all that much better. Lots of high picks in those days never played at all, and I wanted to focus on the picks that turned into stars. (Thunder rumbles and ominous foreshadowing music briefly plays.) Let’s stick with the big names, right?

It goes without saying that some years will be better than others. There are busts in every draft class, and sometimes they’re even the first pick at their position. So we just figure out which years were actually good, narrow it down to a top ten, and you’ve got yourself an easy ranking column for the week before the draft.

What could go wrong?

So I started with 1979, often considered the best draft class ever because it was a double cohort (after the league changed the eligibility age from 19 to 18). It produced the highest-scoring defenseman ever in Ray Bourque, the third-highest scoring forward in Mark Messier, a 700-goal scorer in Mike Gartner, plus Hall-of-Famers like Michel Goulet, Kevin Lowe, Guy Carbonneau and Glenn Anderson. Fertile ground for this sort of thing.

But as it turns out, our draft-based starting six is… just OK. Barely passable, if we’re being honest. We get a solid enough blueline with first overall pick Rob Ramage and sixth pick Craig Hartsburg, but miss Bourque because he went eighth. Mike Foligno bumps Gartner out of the right wing spot by one pick. The center is Perry Turnbull, the left wing is Tom McCarthy. And the goalie is Pat Riggin, an underrated 1980s name but one who was a backup by his mid-20s.

That’s kind of a disappointing way to start, but you get the concept. Let’s dive in and find some more star-studded lineups.

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Who wins, Team Deadline Trade or Team Draft Floor Trade?

Today’s post comes from reader Mike, who recently DM’ed me with a simple question:

Since the only two times a GM can make a trade is at the trade deadline or at the draft (or so we’ve been told), which one gives us the best all time team?

Love it. Since we’re all entering deadline withdrawal, let’s do this before we all forget what a trade is. I’m going back to 1979, which is the start of the entry draft era and one year before the Butch Goring trade ushered in the modern concept of the deadline. Four decades shouldn’t be too much research for one post, right?

But first, a few ground rules™:

– I’m going to define the deadline as the three days before. That’s partly to make sure we can cover most of the big deals – a surprising number of big “deadline” deals didn’t actually happen on the day itself, including that Goring deal everyone thinks is the ultimate deadline move – and party because as we’ll see in a minute, we’re giving the draft three days too. Note that this still rules out some deadline-adjacent deals you might expect to see, like Brian Leetch to Toronto (which came six days before the 2004 deadline)

– For the draft, we’ll go with the three-day window starting the day before the draft begins. That captures all the draft floor deals, including in the modern two-day draft era, plus just enough pre-draft maneuvering to capture the spirit of the thing.

– This one’s important: For deadline deals, we’re looking for players only; trading a pick that turns into a star months or years later doesn’t count. For draft trades, we’ll count picks only if it’s clear that the team knew with certainty that they were going to get a specific player. So that counts deals for the first overall pick, deals where a team traded up during the draft for the next pick on the board, and a handful of other exceptions we’ll get to. But it doesn’t count deals like the Devils trading down from 11th to 20th in 1990 and getting Martin Brodeur; they may have been targeting him, but they couldn’t know that he’d be there ten picks later, so he wasn’t really “in” the trade.

– We want a standard 20-man roster with 12 forwards, six defensemen and two goalies. We’ll try to keep our centers and wings realistic up front but won’t get carried away.

– Finally, our rosters only get credit for everything a player did in his career after the trade. That doesn’t necessarily have to have been with the team that acquired him, but for example Adam Oates doesn’t make Team Deadline based on being traded in 2002 when he was 39 and pretty much done.

Let’s do this. Thanks to Mike, and as always to Hockey Reference, NHL Trade Tracker and Pro Sports Transactions.

First line

Team Deadline starts strong with a trio of Hall-of-Famers. They can use the league’s fifth all-time leading scorer at center in Ron Francis, thanks to the 1991 deal that sent him from Hartford to Pittsburgh. We’ll give him about 1,300 goals worth of wingers in Brett Hull (who was traded at the 1988 deadline) and Marian Hossa (from 2008). That means we’re getting almost all of Hull’s career, all of Francis’s best seasons, and Hossa’s two-way dominance in his second half. Pretty pretty good.

Can Team Draft Floor compete? Well, no. But they can at least ice three Hall-of-Famers of their own, or at least they will once the next class is announced. We’ll start the line with Joe Sakic, who was drafted by the Nordiques with a pick they acquired in the draft floor Dale Hunter trade in 1987. I originally didn’t have Sakic as an eligible choice, but according to then Caps GM David Poile in this news article, the trade went down with Washington on the clock, meaning the Nordiques made it knowing Sakic was on the top of their draft board.

So Sakic makes the cut, and we can give him Daniel Sedin and Henrik Sedin as linemates; they both qualify thanks to Brian Burke’s draft floor wheeling and dealing. Technically, Burke had to wait for the first overall pick, but he had Atlanta’s word that they were taking Patrik Stefan. As much fun as it is to imagine Burke getting double-crossed in that scenario, he knew he was getting the Sedins when he made those trades.

That’s a strong top line for Team Draft Floor, but Team Deadline has a pretty clear early edge.

Second line

Team Deadline starts with two more Hall-of-Fame wingers, and they come from the same trade, as a North Stars/Capitals blockbuster from one minute before the 1989 deadline gives us both Mike Gartner and Dino Ciccarelli. When you can start your second line with over 1,300 goals, you’re in a decent shape. But this is where we run into our first bump in the road for our deadline squad, as it’s already tough to find a top-tier center. Apparently those guys just don’t get moved at the deadline unless they’re Ron Francis, so we’ll have to settle for some good-but-not-great options unless we want the dreaded three-winger line. I’ll go with Pierre Turgeon, who barely makes our three-day limit thanks to the 1995 deal that sent him to the Habs.

Team Draft Floor has no such issues down the middle, as we can give them Mats Sundin, who was traded for Wendel Clark to ooh’s and aah’s on the draft floor in Hartford in 1994. In fact, we’ve got so much center depth that we can shift an all-star pivot to the wing and put Dale Hawerchuk on this line, thanks to the 1990 draft floor deal that sent him from Winnipeg to Buffalo. And we’ll round out the line with Rick Nash, who was the target when the Blue Jackets traded up to the first overall pick just minutes before the 2002 draft started.

This one is close, with each line boasting two Hall-of-Famers. I think the edge goes to Team Deadline once again, since we’re not getting most of Hawerchuk’s best work, but the gap is narrower than it was on the first line.

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NHL era-adjusted mock draft: Why Theo Fleury, Ron Hextall, Alex Mogilny and more would thrive today

The game has changed.

Hockey fans of a certain vintage will often find themselves looking back over fondly remembered highlights and controversial incidents of the past and thinking, boy, if that happened now that guy would’ve been suspended for life.

For younger hockey fans, meanwhile, it’s common to wonder how a Connor McDavid or an Auston Mathews would’ve fared in the 1980s — and to insist that in a world where goalies were 5-foot-9 and smoked half a pack between periods, that they might’ve re-written the NHL record book.

While hockey is a traditionalists game, the evolution of the sport at the NHL level over the last decade and a half has been swift and it has been remarkable.

The goaltenders have gotten larger, adding post-integration techniques that have made “soft” goals even rarer. The salary cap system has caused youth to be served earlier as the years go by, creating an arms race for team speed and relegating the classic, plodding “stay-at-home” defenseman player type all but extinct. Analytics have revolutionized player evaluation, both by the public and by teams themselves. And the way the game is called and legislated by on-ice officials and the Department of Player Safety (an Orwellian moniker if ever there was one) has caused “enforcers” to disappear along with, thankfully, the “keep your head up” type hits that used to punctuate the NHL game.

With a stick tap to our colleagues over on the NBA side of our shop, a crew of The Athletic’s hockey writers (Thomas Drance, Sean Gentille and Sean McIndoe) decided to formalize the “what if?” game with a mock draft that seeks to identify the players from yesteryear who would perform best if they were dropped on the ice, in their prime, in today’s game.

The ground rules:

•Six-round snake draft.

•Every team must feature a complete starting lineup of three forwards (regardless of position), two defenders and a goaltender.

•Eligibility: The player cannot be in the Hockey Hall of Fame and must have played at least 50 percent of their career NHL games after the 1980-81 season and prior to the advent of the Behind the Net era (which we’ve placed in 2008).

The point of the exercise is to identify players who were good in their own time, but who would be absolutely sensational today. If we’re being honest, it’s also about having some fun remembering some guys.

Round 1, pick 1. Team McIndoe selects: RW Alexander Mogilny

Drance: Consensus top pick, but also kind of a squirrel pick. Mogilny would be dominant in any area.

Gentille: Dude was made for 2021, down to the fact that he wore a vanity number. There is no other 89.

McIndoe: This Darren Turcotte erasure will not stand…

Once I lucked into the first overall pick, there wasn’t much debate over who I was going to take. It remains an embarrassment that Mogilny isn’t in the Hall of Fame, but since he somehow isn’t, he’s almost too perfect for this sort of exercise. He was a smart and monstrously skilled presence who could play at both ends and who posted one of the greatest goal-scoring seasons ever, banking a ridiculous 76 in the 1992-93 season. His peak didn’t last long, as injuries and the clutch-and-grab era robbed us of Mogilny’s best. In today’s more wide-open game, and without the pressure of being the first Soviet star to defect, his prime might look like a combination of Datsyuk-ian wizardry mixed with Ovechkin-like finishing.

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31 teams, 31 picks to build the ultimate draft round

Today’s post is another cool idea from a reader. Take it away, Neil:

Do the “Ultimate Draft” next.

Best ever 1st overall. Best ever 2nd overall, etc.

Have to use all 31 teams (sorry, Seattle!)

— Neil Rocha (@isnhhb) October 7, 2020

Love it. The Ultimate First Round. Let’s do this. But first, a few ground rules:

• As Neil says, we’re going to put together one round, lasting 31 picks, from all of NHL Draft history. Every player we take has to have been drafted in that exact slot, and we have to use one pick from all 31 existing teams.
• To up the difficulty even further, I’m going to add another wrinkle: We want to come away with something resembling a realistic extended roster, so I’m going to say we need to use our 31 picks to draft four goalies, nine defensemen and 18 forwards.
• We’re picking guys based on their entire NHL career, not just what they did for the team that actually drafted them.
• While we’re presenting this as the ultimate first round, we’ll allow players who weren’t actually first-round picks as long as their draft slot matches the one we’re on. For example, in the 1980s the 22nd overall pick would have been a second-round choice, but that’s still OK for our team.
• Finally, we’re only looking at players who were drafted by one of the 31 current teams. No picks by the Nordiques, Whalers, Golden Seals, etc. But the Winnipeg Jets count as both the old version and the new. If you’d like to head into the comments or my Twitter mentions to argue technicalities about franchise lineage, let me assure you that I do not care. Go find a Winnipeg hockey fan and tell them they think about hockey wrong. The Jets are the Jets.

Sound good? I think this will be fun...

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Ranking every all-rookie team in NHL history

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The NHL draft has come and gone, and now you’ve had time to absorb the decisions your favorite team made. In the moment, sure, all those prospects they drafted seemed great. But after a few days of sober analysis? Now, your more realistic side takes over, and you come to realize: They’re really great. Like, all of them. There’s a non-zero chance that next year’s all-rookie team will be made up entirely of players your favorite team just drafted.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that just making the all-rookie team isn’t necessarily a guarantee of success. The all-rookie selections – three forwards, two defensemen and a goalie – have been part of the annual awards since 1983. But in the 37 seasons since, some of the picks have held up better in hindsight than others.

That hindsight part is going to be the key to this ranking, since we can judge every year’s team by how well everyone’s careers turned out (or at least, for the most recent ones, which way they’re headed). It’s worth remembering that’s not what the actual voters are trying to do, though. The all-rookie teams are meant to recognize the best rookie seasons, not the rookies with the best long-term potential. So the fact that some of these teams don’t hold up well doesn’t mean the voters were wrong, so much as that the fates and the hockey gods had other ideas. (Or that the voters were wrong. Honestly, it’s probably that.)

We’ll start from 37 and work our way down from the underwhelming squads to the best all-rookie team ever. I’ll be using a strict set of objective criteria which consists of me looking at the six names and deciding whether they were good or not. As always, appeals are welcomed and can be filed through the official process of yelling at Mirtle on Twitter.

37. 2004

Forwards: Trent Hunter, Ryan Malone, Michael Ryder

Defense: John-Michael Liles, Joni Pitkanen

Goalie: Andrew Raycroft

As you’ll see, there aren’t many all-rookie teams that are flat-out bad. But this one … woof. It was a rough year for rookies, with nobody scoring more than 25 goals or cracking 65 points. The best you could say for this group is that one of them got traded for Tuukka Rask, but I can’t remember which one and it’s probably not important. Meanwhile, an 18-year-old Patrice Bergeron was ignored by the voters, and the whole team was so bad the league decided it needed to take a year off and regroup.

36. 2000

Forwards: Simon Gagne, Scott Gomez, Mike York

Defense: Brian Rafalski, Brad Stuart

Goalie: Brian Boucher

These guys all had reasonable NHL careers to at least some extent, but Gomez is the only one who was ever much of a star, even as Rafalski developed into an underrated contributor. The only name that really stands out as a potential snub is Alex Tanguay, whose 51 points trailed only Gomez among rookies.

35. 1996

Forwards: Daniel Alfredsson, Eric Daze, Petr Sykora

Defense: Ed Jovanovski, Kyle McLaren

Goalie: Corey Hirsch

No Hall of Famers yet, although I still think Alfredsson probably gets there someday. That will save a year that was otherwise pretty underwhelming, although Daze’s back issues may have kept him from having a bigger impact. One weird note: Sykora got the last forward spot even though he finished well back of Saku Koivu in Calder voting.

34. 2001

Forwards: Martin Havlat, Brad Richards, Shane Willis

Defense: Lubomir Visnovsky, Colin White

Goalie: Evgeni Nabokov

It’s a group that won’t produce any Hall of Famers, although Nabokov was in the best goalie conversation for a good chunk of his career and Richards won a Conn Smythe. Willis scored 20 goals for the Hurricanes, then only 11 more in his career. Other rookies this year: Marian Gaborik, Roberto Luongo and the Sedins.

33. 1998

Forwards: Patrik Elias, Mike Johnson, Sergei Samsonov

Defense: Derek Morris, Mattias Ohlund

Goalie: Jamie Storr

It’s a solid enough group, but one without any Hall of Famers unless Elias can squeeze his way in. Storr only played 17 games, but there just weren’t any rookie goalies that year. Other notable rookies include Patrick Marleau and Joe Thornton, who debuted with a meagre seven point season and didn’t get so much as a single Calder vote.

32. 2003

Forwards: Tyler Arnason, Rick Nash, Henrik Zetterberg

Defense: Jay Bouwmeester, Barret Jackman

Goalie: Sebastien Caron

Yeah, apparently we just stopped making prospects in the early 2000s. This class did give us Nash, who seemed like he’d become a Hall of Famer, and Zetterberg, who still might. Bouwmeester had a long and successful career. But Caron only played two more full seasons and was never a full-time starter. And unlike most of these years, there aren’t even any obvious misses from a year where Zetterberg’s 44 points led all rookies.

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Puck Soup: Draft, trades, UFAs

In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Wrapping up the world's longest draft
- Thoughts on how the virtual draft was presented
- Where we think the top UFAs will end up (and what we'd like to see)
- Trade talk
- Some Star Wars crap
- NHL 94 is coming back
- Can Ryan design a quiz so simple that even Greg can understand it?

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Which draft round makes the second best all-time roster?

What’s the best round in NHL draft history?

It’s the first round. Sorry if you were hoping I’d build some suspense, but this one was a little bit obvious. I’m not even really sure you could come up with a cute contrarian take here. The first round leaves the competition in the dust. Mario Lemieux, Connor McDavid, Sidney Crosby, Alexander Ovechkin, Martin Brodeur, Ray Bourque, Jaromir Jagr… yeah, I’ll take those guys. Real tough call, great topic for an article, genius.

OK, so what’s the second best round in NHL history?

That gets a little trickier. Your instinct might be that the second best round must be, well, the second round. But is it? Here’s the thing about the NHL draft: Once you get past the obvious picks in the first round, a whole lot of uncertainty kicks in.

So today, as we get ready to watch the league draft rounds two through seven in a day-long blitz of picks, let’s build some all-time rosters from all the players who didn’t get the glory of being a first-round pick. We’re going to make eight teams: One for each round from two through seven, another for the eighth round and later (which doesn’t exist anymore, but used to), and one for undrafted players.

But first, a few ground rules:

• We’ll build 20-man rosters with four centers, eight wings, six defensemen and two goalies. Wingers can switch sides because I’m weeks away from some time off and I just don’t have the mental energy to deal with the whole “there are no good LWs” thing today.

• Active players are allowed, with the usual caveat that they only get credit for what they’ve done so far in their career.

• When we get to the undrafted team, we’ll only include players who arrived after the draft became the primary way to acquire young players in 1969 since otherwise it would just be packed with guys like Gordie Howe and Rocket Richard who weren’t drafted because there wasn’t one.

We’ve got eight rosters to build, so let’s dive in. And we’ll start with the team that enters as the prohibitive favorite. But can they live up to the hype?

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Remembering five of history’s weirdest draft classes

The NHL draft starts tomorrow, and I can’t tell you what’s going to happen, because Cory Pronman already did. But I can make two predictions with confidence: Every team is going to tell us that they’re thrilled with their 2020 draft class, and the whole thing is going to be weird.

The weirdness will come from the setting, as the league ditches the big everyone-in-one-building draft floor (for obvious reasons) and shifts to a virtual setup. And the teams will say they love their draft classes because teams always do that. The next GM who walks out of a draft saying “Man, we messed up, these guys are a bunch of bums” will be the first, and also my new hero.

So today, let’s get ready for a weird draft full of great classes by mashing those two concepts together into one: Weird draft classes from NHL history. We’ll revisit five times that a team went into a draft and came out with something that, in hindsight, was kind of remarkable.

There aren’t the best classes ever, or the worst, or the most important. It’s just five interesting stories to kill some time on a Monday before your team drafts a new franchise player and/or screws up everything forever. Let’s remember some NHL draft oddities.

1977 Montreal Canadians, aka In Crease Increase

Imagine you’re a scout for the 1977 Montreal Canadiens. You’ve just come off what might very well have been the greatest season in NHL history, a 60-8-12 masterpiece that ended with your second of what will turn out to be four straight Cups. You have the best coach ever (Scotty Bowman), the best GM ever (Sam Pollock), and an absolutely stacked lineup. Oh, and your goaltender is Ken Dryden, who was just a first-team all-star for the third time in four years. And he’s only 29.

What’s your draft plan? Apparently, it’s “draft all the goalies”, because the 1977 Canadiens took seven of them.

Seven! In one draft. I’m all for having a strategy and sticking to it, but that seems extreme.

It’s not quite as crazy as it might seem to modern eyes – remember, this was back when the draft could go on forever. The Canadiens used 27 picks that year, stretching out to a 15th round, so it’s not like they only took goalies. But still… seven? When you only have one net, which is currently occupied by a legend in his prime? (And in case you’re wondering, their backup goalie was Bunny Larocque, who’d led the league in GAA that season.)

So how’d they do with all those goalies? Not great. Their first goalie pick, fourth-rounder Robert Holland, only played two NHL seasons, neither with the Canadiens. They did a little better with seventh-rounder Richard Sevigny, who was a part-time starter in Montreal for five seasons in the 80s. Mark Holden played eight NHL games. And the other four goalies they took never made the big leagues at all.

It was all part of a decidedly mixed bag for that 1977 Habs draft. They found a future Hall-of-Famer at the end of the second round in Rod Langway. But they also spent a third-round pick on Moe Robinson, the younger brother of Larry, who lasted one game. And they used the 10th overall pick on Mark Napier, passing on a fellow right-winger who was a hometown kid from Montreal. Some guy named Mike Bossy.

1983 Detroit Red Wings, aka Toughen Up

The most famous Red Wings draft of all time came in 1989. That was the year they found two Hall-of-Famers who’d form the core of a Cup team (Nicklas Lidstrom and Sergei Federov), plus two more 1,000-game NHLers (Mike Sillinger and Dallas Drake), plus Soviet star Vladimir Konstantinov in the 11th round. Not bad. But not my favorite Wings draft.

No, that would be 1983. It’s a draft every Detroit fan remembers fondly, because it saw the Wings land Steve Yzerman with the fourth overall pick. That took a bit of luck – the North Stars spent the first overall pick on Brian Lawton and the Whalers took Sylvain Turgeon, leaving both Yzerman and Pat LaFontaine on the board for the Sabres and Wings at three and four. That’s the draft, though. You do your homework, and hope a franchise player drops to your pick.

And what do you do when it all breaks right and you get that franchise player? Well, if it’s 1983 and you play in the Norris Division, you make sure you protect him. And you do that by drafting three of the most legendary tough guys in hockey history.

The Wings got started in round three, grabbing big winger Bob Probert from the Soo Greyhounds. Probie would go on to become the NHL’s all-time heavyweight champ, but the Wings apparently figured he could use some backup, so they used a fifth-round pick on Saskatoon Blades’ wrecking ball Joey Kocur. And just to make sure nobody got any ideas when both those guys were in the box, the Wings added some insurance in the 10th round, taking Stu “The Grim Reaper” Grimson from the Regina Pats.

To be clear, none of those guys were one-dimensional enforcers coming out of junior. (Probert in particular was really good, with 72 points in 44 games for the Hounds.) And as it turned out, Grimson never signed and went back in the 1985 draft, where he was taken by the Flames. He’d eventually end up in Detroit for a few years in the mid-90s, but by that point Kocur was winning Cups in New York and Probert was on his way to Chicago.

So no, Yzerman never got to suit up for a game knowing all three guys were behind him, although I’m guessing that the Bruise Brothers provided enough protection on their own. But the effort was there. To this day, only 44 players in NHL history have racked up more than 2,100 PIM over their careers, and at the rate the game is going that list might not grow. It’s an exclusive club. And three of them were picked by the same team in the same draft.

---

1993 Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, aka This Guy Looks Familiar

This was the first draft in Anaheim franchise history. And they got off to a strong start, managing to pick the leading scorer in the draft.

Any Ducks fan knows how the team spent its first ever draft pick. The Ducks had the fourth overall pick, and after watching Alexandre Daigle, Chris Pronger and Chris Gratton go off the board, they grabbed the reigning Hobey Baker Award winner. That would be Paul Kariya, and while his career was shortened by injuries, he was easily the best forward in the draft, and his 989 points in 989 games was the most by any player taken that day.

But he’s not the leading scorer I was referring to.

Kariya was the leading scorer from the 1993 draft. But I said the Ducks took the leading scorer in the draft. Which they did.

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Puck Soup: Revisiting the 2010 draft

In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- The NHL is considering a new playoff format that is very weird
- I have a conspiracy theory about that
- The Blackhawks make a surprising change at the top
- We review the 2010 draft, including the picks, the trades, the busts and the real top ten
- Dennis Rodman, Blink 182 and sitcom dads
- And more...

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, listen on The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes.

>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.

Ranking the top 10 prospects of whichever team you personally cheer for

The NFL draft starts tonight, and as a hockey writer, it’s hard not to feel a little bit jealous of my football colleagues. They’ve got lots to write about these days, with actual news and transactions to report on.

And more importantly, as every sportswriter knows, fans love prospect talk. They can’t get enough of it. And if you cover an NFL team, you now get to spend weeks profiling and projecting and ranking all of these new prospects.

Well, I want in on that action. So today, I’m presenting my breakdown of the top 10 prospects of your favorite hockey team.

That’s right, your team. No, I don’t know which one that is. And no, I’m not going to let that stop me. I’m pretty sure I can accurately break down your top 10. How hard can it be? Move over Pronman and Wheeler, I’ve got the prospect beat covered today.

1. The first-round pick from the most recent draft

This guy is a sure thing. No, first-round picks don’t always turn out, and you never really know how a player will develop. But this guy is a virtual lock. From the moment the team announced his name, you’ve seen nothing but praise for his well-rounded game, not to mention his pedigree and character. Also, the team’s GM said he couldn’t believe he was still available when their pick came, and it’s illegal to lie about that sort of thing.

This prospect has already been penciled in as a regular in the lineup for the coming season, and honestly, that’s probably being conservative. He’s pretty much a sure-thing for the top six and will probably be driving the first line by November. Calder Trophy? You won’t guarantee anything, but yeah, it’s more likely than not. That’s the beauty of a first-round pick. They’re locks.

2. The first-round pick from a few years ago who should really be here by now but it’s fine

Sometimes it just takes a little while longer, right? There’s no need to worry. Who’s panicking? Not you. Certainly not you.

Would it be nice if this prospect was already producing in the NHL, like the guy taken one pick ahead of him and also one pick behind him and also the three other picks after that and somehow several guys from later rounds? Yes. In a perfect world, that would be happening. But that is not happening, and you’re fine with this.

Remember, it’s not unusual for prospects to need a few years before they can stick in the NHL and still go on to become legitimate superstars. It happened with Mark Scheifele and also … uh … look, Scheifele’s good, OK? This guy will be too. Everybody just stop panicking.

3. The mid-round sleeper pick you’re a little too invested in

This guy didn’t get much attention when he was drafted, and everyone just kind of forgot about him almost immediately. But then he went back to junior and put up better than expected numbers, and fans started paying attention.

And you were at the front of the line, jumping on the bandwagon before anyone else. Sure, it was like seven minutes before everyone else, but that still counts. You have appointed yourself president and founder of this fan club, and you will personally fight anyone who says anything bad about this prospect.

Bottom line: This kid is going to be good. He has to be. Because if he isn’t, you’re going to feel like you’ve wasted a big chunk of your sports-fan life.

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